Intego Internet Security Barrier X5 AntiSpam (Mac)

I've used the free anti-virus ClamAV recently and this is my point of comparison. I've only ever found one (harmless) virus on a mac and that was around 1995, using norton antivirus (before it caused kernel crashes).

First impressions were not promising, net update thought I wasn't licensed, but changed it's mind on retry. You'll need to renew subscriptions each year to keep the applications working, which is around £30, then updates to the next version will probably cost £50. So this gets expensive fast.

Why so much useless packaging? This could easily come in a CD case. It could do with a printed manual or at least a quick start guide.

The virus part found no viruses, it's questionable if there are any 'common' mac viruses out there at the moment, so it's hard to judge how good it's definitions are. ClamAV found no viruses either, but correctly discovered a phishing email. Intego didn't find this, but correctly discovered corrupted files. The GUI is awful and unnecessarily flash, it shouldn't complicate matters, then doesn't automatically display results on finishing a scan. One thing it beats ClamAV on, is the speed. Running ClamAV takes forever and slows the whole system down with spinning beachballs of death. Intego virus happily works in the background, although its automatic scans of external drives can slow things down and the beachballs return. Still, I think the free ClamAV will suit most peoples needs.

Anti-spam was pointless, I'd already trained Apple Mail to effectively deal with "Junk", so having to train yet another Spam filter was annoying, but it did appear to correctly judge newsletters as spam-like, although did miss the occasional email. It maybe more useful for people that receive lots of spam (I never get the erectile dysfunction or scam emails, I'm luckily off the radar at the moment).

Updates seem very regular and often.

Netbarrier never rooted out dodgy connections, It probably correctly thinks itunes genius is spyware, which was just annoying, but things can be adjusted with some patience.
Netbarrier does a poor job explaining what it's doing, you need to understand networking to get the most out of it, it requires some fiddling. You can download the 175 page manual if you want...
I found Apples firewall worked well enough for my needs.

For me it main minus point was not having a decent printed manual which would explain the functions and trojans/viruses. It's not a great user experience for an average user. I used a copy of anti-virus to see if my mum could understand it, and it proved woeful. I'm glad I didn't try the Anti-spam version, as it would have frustrated her. It requires an intermediate user, someone with a little experience of how applications work. A photoshop user will find it easy to configure, but an ilife user may struggle with some of it. A barrier is only as good as the person who installs it, it needs to be more intuitive. People will tend to set the Netbarrier to the simplest settings and get reduced protection.

It probably does what it claims on the box, but I've yet to find a reason for having it, and at £50-£75 it doesn't seem worth it. It's interface came across as clunky and unhelpful.
As Apple Macs become more popular, perhaps it will prove useful eventually. I'd recommend you save your money for now and give this a miss.

This is a good general purpose security package.

There is a vigorous debate in Mac Land about whether Macs actually need virus checkers at a all, I think that even if Macs don't directly get viruses it's worth knowing if files you pass on or receive contain viruses.

Virus barrier is a decent package which I've owned since 2005, it works quickly through the drive and alerts you quickly if there's a problem and gives you sensible options thereafter. I have to say I don't think I've seen a virus since 2000 on my Mac, but I think this time will be coming to an end soon. The only downside is that you must exclude any backup partitions from the scan and I have had one instance where virus barrier fought with my excellent backup software (SuperDuper) which I'm pretty sure was VB's fault. Support were poor on this occasion although they have been excellent before this.

NetBarrier is a good product with some simple canned set-ups and a useful alerting service. I've had no problems with it, and it's useful to have a software firewall for my laptop, when you leave the safety of your hardware firewall behind.

I found the anti-spam engine to be pretty much useless, in version 4 it didn't catch image spam, was a pain to set up and soon I went back to Entourage's built in spam detector which seemed to work much better.

Note that Intego charge you separately for all product updates - you need to pay approx £20 EACH for one year for NetBarrier/ Virus barrier and the AntiSpam products. Also you'll get charged at French sales tax levels if you buy online. This seems excessive to me, and I only ever renew the AV license. I'm not sure what the use of the NetBarrier updates is and Intego have never convinced me it's worth it. It's time they wrapped the updates together and charged a LOT less.
Incidentally, don't be afraid to haggle with support or sales if you update and they cut off your free 1 year's updates or if you want to upgrade or install on more than one machine.

The only other thing to note is that Leopard has a decent firewall built in (although hard to configure) and there are free AV tools out there (ClamXav and iAntiVirus), so you'll need to decide yourself. My take is that commercial updates for the virus checker is worth it.

In summary a pass for the anti-virus, and A for the firewall and a fail for the anti-spam. Support gets a pass for its former glories. Overall a B+.

**UPDATE** I'm retesting the Anti-virus test as I got a free copy from Amazon.
I disabled all the spam filtering at both my ISPs and I'm getting a high level of spam to test it on and I have to say it is catching all the spam I throw at it. It's a bit gung-ho, however, and it has marked a mail from Amazon as spam and one from an airline booking - these don't strike me as marginal cases. Given that false positives are a lot worse than false negatives and that it's a lot more fiddly to set up and use than the built in spam detector in Entourage (and slower in action) I still can't recommend it.

NB the AV caught it's first virus in the Windows partition on my laptop!

Intego Internet Security Barrier X5 is a package containing arguably the best Mac anti-virus software and a good quality firewall. The package also somes with their Antispam product, but give it a miss. Mail.app generally does a better job.

NetBarrier is a sophisticated firewall application which is easy for your average member of the public to set up, but also gives the more technically inclined powerful configuration tools. If it has one fault it is that the product has an intrusion alarm like a fog horn and I have looked foolish when doing presentations on clients networks.

VirusBarrier is a similarly powerful anti-virus software. It is a no-nonsense easy to use product and does not affect your machine's real-world performance significantly.

Buying these products together in this bundle saves you about 30 quid. For that alone Internet Security Barrier comes highly recommended.